To put it still more precisely, if we found a whole
series of remains of man's ancestors during the Tertiary, we
should probably class them, broadly, as femur-remains in the
Eocene, monkey-remains in the Oligocene, and ape-remains in the
Miocene. In that sense only man "descends from a monkey."
The far more important question is: How did this one particular
group of anthropoid animals of the Miocene come to surpass all
its cousins, and all the rest of the mammals, in
brain-development? Let us first rid the question of its supposed
elements of mystery and make of it a simple problem. Some imagine
that a sudden and mysterious rise in intelligence lifted the
progenitor of man above its fellows. The facts very quickly
dispel this illusion. We may at least assume that the ancestor of
man was on a level with the anthropoid ape in the Miocene period,
and we know from their skulls that the apes were as advanced then
as they are now. But from the early Miocene to the Pleistocene is
a stretch of about a million years on the very lowest estimate.
In other words, man occupied about a million years in travelling
from the level of the chimpanzee to a level below that of the
crudest savage ever discovered.
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